In an image reading apparatus used in, for example, a copier, a bill reader, a scanner, a facsimile, etc., plural pairs of an image-forming lens and a linear image sensor are arranged in a main scanning direction.
Each image-forming lens of the image reading apparatus collects light scattered by a reading object which is moved in a sub-scanning direction, and captures the collected light on an image-forming surface of a corresponding linear image sensor, and thereby forms an image of the reading object on the image-forming surface.
The linear image sensor of the image reading apparatus reads the image formed by the image-forming lens.
The image-forming lenses arranged in the main scanning direction are disposed such that a part of a field-of-view region of one image-forming lens overlaps a part of a field-of-view region of an image-forming lens disposed adjacent to the one image-forming lens, and an image combining process for the images respectively read by the linear image sensors is performed, by which the images are overlapped. The field-of-view region is a region in which the light scattered by the reading object is collected.